All hail the mushroom cloud
May 13th, 2008
This is how you make a proper unsubscribe feature for your newsletters. I click the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email, I get a page with this, and it’s done. No further action needed. First I thought it was a bit unsecure without a confirmation button, but then I spotted the resubscribe link in case you accidentally unsubscribed.
That’s good design by 37Signals.
To their credit, if that’s the right word, you can now purchase some music from the iTunes store that is unencrypted and plays anywhere. Apple calls these songs “iTunes Plus”, because it sounds so much better than calling everything else “iTunes Minus.” Mark Pilgrim
Apr 28th, 2008
Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about content outsourcing and the vanishing personal site, which is exactly the direction I was heading with Reconsidering Blogging. I would have written more there, but it felt tough enough to just accomplish that much.
While I love all these wonderful social sites like Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter and various other clever services that tend to end in -r, I am starting to feel like I spread myself thin across the internet. So many places to post stuff to, so many places that contain fragments of my thought streams. It’s hard to keep track of me.
As I wrote, I feel that I have a certain expected level of quality for things I want to post on my personal site. While I grin just as much as anyone else at lolcats, that’s not really stuff I’d like to post here.
I’ve started experimenting a bit with Tumblr — you can find me here. Just like I enjoy the 140-character format of Twitter, the Tumbler format of posting various short text snippets, quotes and images is also very appealing. That default theme doesn’t quite agree with me about what a quote is, though. I have a habit of finding interesting quotes that can span several paragraphs, so blowing up the text size like that can get confusing. But I’ll fiddle with that later.
But Tumblr is still an experiment for me. I don’t find myself wanting to post there that frequently. Twitter is still the main source for my thought streams. I’ll keep fiddling with it for a while, and if I find a format that works for me I’ll try to incorporate it into my social stream.
So here’s the crux of it: do I try to tie it all together on my personal site, or just leave it with links to the various services I use?
Let’s look at what some other people do.
Jon Tan has a front page that is not the actual blog, but contains the first sentences from the latest blog entries prominently displayed in the center column. He then uses a very condensed format of asides, with just a link to the services he uses, and then a link to a separate page titled Asides, also linked from the top of the page. The Asides page itself looks very good and readable. One column with bookmarks from Delicious, one column with tweets from Twitter, and a third column with thumbnails from Flickr and Upcoming events below those.
Great idea, might steal it.
dooce has a two-column layout with Twitter and Flickr items in the sidebar. Classic blog layout, not much else to say about it. Still looking great though.
It started with Zeldman, so it might as well end there too. He has the two-column layout with a note on where he will be speaking (hey, offline thought streams counts too), a single tweet and a list of the recent entries in the sidebar.
Time to think it over. I’ll probably think by sketching out a new layout for the site. Tends to end up that way when I think design.
Apr 25th, 2008
Some email about making custom smileys arrives from MSN Live. I don’t even use the “official” MSN client since I refuse to use anything that shoves ads in my face in an intrusive manner.
I do use the MSN Messenger service though, so it might be prudent to just unsubscribe to their marketing spam rather than flag it spam and miss potential emails about the actual service. So I click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the mail, log in, select “I don’t want this stuff” at three different places, click submit, and… a red-colored text that says “Error 500″ appears.
I try to submit two more times. More error 500.
This is where I sigh, go back to Gmail, and click “report spam”.
Here’s some helpful hints from an email user: I can report your mail as spam with a single click. If you can’t add a one-click unsubscribe link (also, it helps if it actually works), then I can report your mail as spam with a single click. I don’t want to have to jump through hoops to do this. There’s no need for me to have to log in and navigate the site to find my account preferences.
It’s all a cost/benefit calculation. This cost me time. The benefit was that I might still want to get things like password reminders (in case I suffer from sudden brain trauma) and information about service changes.
Had this been a web shop I would most likely have clicked “report as spam” right away. I can accept having to provide a password, but after that it should opt me out instantly.
The worst offender I’ve seen here is CD-WOW. After logging in the user preferences had two places where you needed to deselect your spamming preferences — under separate tabs with nearly identical names. I only spotted one of them, and logically assumed that it would work. Then I got more marketing trash from them, got annoyed since I had already declared my preferences, and now their mails go straight to the spamcan.
This World of Goo trailer kind of makes me want a Wii. The combination of cutesy looks (somewhat Tim Burton-ish) and ominous, melancholy epic music tickles my brain in all the right spots.
The fact that the first response to “John Locke” was Lost and not Second Treatise on Civil Government or An Essay Concerning Human Understanding really shouldn’t surprise me nearly as much as it does. Minwee
Apr 10th, 2008
For some reason I have immense problems writing bloggy stuff while sitting at my desk. So I grabbed my laptop and sat down in the couch and promptly got a strong urge to fall asleep. The comfy couch strikes again! But before I collapse I’ll try to squeeze out an actual blog entry.
The ten entries currently on the front page stretch back a year. The entry before this one was written six months ago. That’s… not really a good update frequency. So for the last week or so I’ve been reconsidering the whole format for this site.
Apr 9th, 2008
Today is CSS Naked Day. The idea is simple: strip all CSS from your site for a day. If your site doesn’t degrade gracefully, shame on you!
It may not be very pretty to look at (except in a 1995 kind of way), but my site is still fully readable. I didn’t make this Wordpress theme though, but I use the very same design principles — and this is essentially how blind people read web pages.
The new British coin designs are indeed very lovely. Via Kottke.
Apr 2nd, 2008
So the Earth Hour was this weekend. I missed it completely. Which in my opinion wouldn’t really have mattered anyway. The amount of energy saved can be discussed.
And the end of the hour in Sydney was celebrated with fireworks. Yeah, good job there. “We saved energy! Let’s celebrate this by polluting the environment!”
Want to do something for nature? Go outside, take a walk, pick up garbage for an hour. Of course, that involves some actual work instead of turning off most of your lights and patting yourself on the back, so I guess that’ll never get popular.